Wu Zetian: The Silk Road's Celestial Pivot

A fragment of a Dunhuang manuscript hints that Wu Zetian buried the Western Regions’ greatest treasure, “Heavenly Pivot,” beneath Samarkand.

I’m Chen Yao, a Tang history expert, and I’ve been forced to team up with various factions to hunt for it.

We had barely arrived in Uzbekistan when a teammate was killed after accidentally triggering a mechanism in an ancient Sogdian tomb.

Local warlords, international antiquities traffickers, and even a mysterious family of tomb guardians soon appeared one after another.

In the ancient city of Bukhara, we discovered that the “Heavenly Pivot” wasn’t made of gold or silver. It contained records of a lost alchemical art from the Western Regions.

But the deadliest threat was that someone on our team had already been bribed and was leading us straight into a carefully laid death trap...